NetSuite Tips & Tricks
Hello NetSuite people!
Will Goodbourn here – I’m a Solution Consultant for NetSuite and NextService at Klugo Group. NetSuite is such a flexible system, and one of the great side effects of that is the collaborative community that has popped up around it. I love to use NetSuite to solve business problems, and I love talking to others who do too. In that spirit, I’d like to share some tips & tricks I’ve learned in a regular post. Some of the tips will be simple, and some of them more technical, but hopefully there will be something there for everyone, and I’d encourage you to join the conversation around optimising your use of NetSuite and extending the platform.
Did you know…
Here’s a simple tip that a lot of people aren’t aware of: if you want to quickly catch up on interactions with a customer – there’s a “Show Activity” button hidden in the Actions menu on each customer record.
This will give you a pop-up printout of every activity and email sent to and from that customer in an easy to scroll list. You can get up to speed on what’s been happening and it’s much quicker than rifling through all the old interactions.
RSS Feeds
One feature I don’t often see people making the most of is RSS feeds on the NetSuite dashboard. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, it stands for Rich Site Summary – and it’s basically just a way for information updates to be published in a feed so people can subscribe to it. NetSuite has some built in RSS feeds you can subscribe to like Yahoo business news, but where it gets really interesting is there are a lot of online tools that will help you build a custom RSS feed for all sorts of different uses.
Two examples I've used recently:
- Queryfeed.net lets you use a simple search tool to scrape Twitter, Facebook or Google for mentions of a particular keyword or keywords. So you can monitor every time someone mentions your company on Twitter – or keep an eye on the buzz around an industry event that affects you.
- Simpletracking.com will give you all the updates on a DHL tracking number so you can monitor delivery on an important package you’re expecting or delivering to a customer.
Each of these services will give you a website address URL that has the code for your custom RSS feed. Then all you have to do is:
- Click the “Personalise” link at the top right hand corner of your NetSuite dashboard, which gives you a menu of all the dashboard “portlets” that are available. From there you can select RSS Feed and drag it wherever you like.
- Click the “Setup” link at the top of your new RSS feed portlet to change the source.
- In the “Feed URL” field, enter in the URL for your new RSS feed.
- There you have it! Here’s one I copied in from Queryfeed that gives me all the mentions of Klugo Group on twitter:
What I love about this is how many uses you could find for it. If anyone has an interesting way they use RSS feeds in NetSuite I’d love to hear about it!
If you're a NetSuite saved search nerd, watch this space, next week I'll show how to put summary and detail info in the same search.
Until next time NetSuite people,
Will Goodbourn
0472 800 868
I am experimenting with this feature to create a bulletin board type option by pulling in Wix blog entries. One problem I am having is that it doesn't seem to be refreshing to show new blog entries. Any thoughts?
Excellent! Learnt something new :) Thank you for sharing!
That's a great idea Joe, on both counts. That would be a great saved search particularly if you have a seasonal sales cycle - similar idea I did recently for a client with recurring customers was a dashboard search that highlights customers who have a high historical value and haven't bought in a certain number of days.
Thanks for these tips. I did not know about the activity stream. Re the RSA feeds, I used then to put horticultural news on the user's dash boards. Works very well for getting people to consider marketing / sales opportunities. Another super useful idea for businesses with cyclic buying patterns is to create a customer saved search of customers that historically purchased in the *coming* month by using the transaction date criteria, with a relative date range. That saved search can then be placed on the home screen as a call to action.